LINDA GOLDWAY KEEN was born in New York City. She attended the Bronx High School of
Science, where she was first taken with the elegance of mathematics in her geometry class.
After receiving her BS degree from the City College of New York, she studied at the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and received her PhD in 1964. She wrote her
thesis on Riemann surfaces under the direction of Lipman Bers.

After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Keen took a position at Hunter
College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. When, in 1968, the
Bronx campus of Hunter became the independent Lehman College, Keen moved to Lehman and has
been there ever since. She was made full professor in 1974. She has held visiting
professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, Boston
University, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well
as at various mathematical institutes in Europe and South America.

Keen served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics during 1985-1986
and as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society during 1992-1995. In 1975, she
presented an AMS Invited Address at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, D.C.,
and in 1989 she presented an MAA Joint Invited Address at the Joint Summer Meetings in
Boulder, Colorado. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Geometric Analysis and a
coordinating editor for the Proceedings of the AMS.

In her Noether Lecture, Keen focused on the interplay between the analytic and
geometric aspects of classifying Riemann surfaces. She originally tackled this problem in
her thesis and subsequent early work. In the early 1960s, Bers and Ahlfors showed that the
space of conformal structures on a given Riemann surface can be modeled on a Banach space
with a real analytic structure. Keen defined the set of parameters for this space in terms
of the hyperbolic structure of a given surface determined by the conformal structure. In
the mid-1980s, she returned to this problem, this time in collaboration with Caroline
Series. By this time, Bers had proved that the space of conformal structures on Riemann
surfaces admits a complex analytic structure, and Maskit had defined an embedding of that
space into complex n-dimensional space for appropriate n. Using powerful techniques
developed by Thurston that involve hyperbolic three-manifolds, Keen and Series gave a
geometric interpretation to Maskit's parameters.

Keen has also collaborated with Paul Blanchard, Robert Devaney, and Lisa Goldberg in
the area of dynamical systems. She finds working with other mathematicians more exciting
and less frustrating than working on her own. She says, "I am basically a social
person and enjoy people."

Keen's father was an English teacher and she says, "not only was mathematics
fascinating, but it seemed as far away from English as I could get." Her father,
though, was always encouraging. "I feel very lucky. First my father, then my thesis
advisor, and finally my husband and children have been extremely supportive."